For this I come back from vacation.
1-- We\'ve done the Queen\'s Plate almost every year, maybe every year, since 1997. It\'s their Kentucky derby. I guess this is news to you.
2-- During that time we\'ve given away data for around 500 races. You also use Ragozin, what has he given you? We give you free ice cream, you complain it\'s not mint chocolate chip.
3-- Feel free to show us any mistakes we make, we\'ll be glad to take a look at them. We always do (ask Miff), and we always report back here. This is another major difference between us and the boys on 11th st.-- we have pointed out many outright mistakes they have made in big races, and demonstrated publicly that they are definitely actual mistakes (like getting the beaten lengths wrong by a lot in the SJ Derby). The Ragozin office refused to acknowledge OR CORRECT the errors.
4-- You are right, I am very interested in getting the game cleaned up, and I am using this board, my position, and my leverage with bettors to accomplish that. Sue me.
5-- Race Shapes--
a) At the point we had that conversation they were being tested, and were free.
b) They are not \"speed points\". That\'s your thing, not ours.
c) They are a guide. By definition. Which does not mean they are not accurate. But when you use an average interesting things can happen. Like-- if you look at last week\'s ROTW, you\'ll see that for Tres Borrachos, his graph was thrown off by his previous start, in the Preakness, where he had a lot of trouble early. His adjusted quarter time for that race was about 3 seconds (from memory) slower than the two that preceded it, and it dragged down his average. With a clean break he figured to show more speed and be closer to the lead than the Shape showed, and he was. That\'s why we show the individual times. Get it?
5-- Today\'s post-- I know you won\'t get this, but having horses repeat figures is a sign of accuracy of your data base. All projection-style figures (us, Ragozin, Beyer, Time-Form) are based on using past figures as a guide, which in turn is based on the idea that horses run back to previous figures. As long as you don\'t play around with the relationships within a race (like Friedman admitted to with Pyro\'s number earlier this year), repeaters are good sign.
6-- Delaware-- ah, Delaware. In my meeting with the Jockey Club Committee about drugs I called that place \"Dodge City\", the worst in the country. I told them that from what I had heard, the drug of choice there was raceday Clenbuterol.
In an unrelated story, they announced yesterday that Larry Jones just got a Clenbuterol positive at Delaware. He\'s been getting some AMAZING jumpups down there, with horses that weren\'t running nearly as fast elsewhere.
NO, I don\'t think those fast Delaware horses of Jones, Lake, et al will carry their form to tracks outside the Mid-Atlantic states.
